Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Steam punk is one of the most creative cultures in Second Life, and one that normally does not involve a lot of sex. Steam punk have created some of the most interesting and well executed Sims in the entire Metaverse, and this is one of the best.

Tuesday, 11 October 2011

These two graphics show the geo-tagged tweeting over a several hour period. We have displayed the tweets "Matrix" style, with green dots on a black background. Just like the way the core Matrix was shown in the movies.

What you can clearly see is the outline of many major cities and even coast lines in the United States and Western Europe. This shows clearly that unlike the movie our Internet is coming from the world. That the creation of data to the web is conditioned by real space which is itself governed by the sociological and climate conditions of our world. You can clearly make out the consequences of real history forming the way open community data is being published to the web, with certain places and cultures producing more geo-tagged data than others.

Above is the data flow through the Matrix as show in the movie. This is a data space of constant data streams which create the illusion in persons of a real world. But you cannot see any sight of the real world from the stream itself. The data that makes up the world of the Matrix is not itself structure by spacial reality, but rather creates spatial reality as an effect. Reality as lived by the people in the Matrix is not reflected in the data architecture of the Matrix itself, in the movie.

What we do see looks more like the map above, which shows the United States as seen from space on a perfectly clear night. So the world we see around us everyday and which we take for reality is conditioning and forming the emergence of the world wide web.

We would even say thinking in terms of cyberspace is misleading. The web is an extension of real space, and how real space is used and 'constructed' in our everyday lives.

So we can be pretty confident that we not only don't live in a Matrix, but that the web we are creating today does not behave like the virtual world imagined in the movie The Matrix.